For a while, it must have seemed quite a ride. Lance Armstrong was not only the strongest cyclist in the world, having beaten the Europeans at their own game to win seven Tour de France yellow jerseys between 1999 and 2005, but he did so after enduring a horrific series of treatments for testicular cancer that had spread through his body to his brain. Before his illness, he had never finished an entire Tour de France. Now, having returned from the jaws of death, he was the best in the world.

Inevitably, allegations of doping trailed behind him like confetti but, even when every other cyclist who shared a podium with him had been sprung taking one of growth hormones, cortisone, a red blood-cell stimulant, testosterone or even a saved infusion of their own blood, Armstrong always came out of tests clean. As he said in 2005, after winning the Tour with the fastest recorded average pace in the race's history, he was the most tested athlete in the world.

A still from The Armstrong Lie, which chronicles Lance Armstrong's improbable rise and ultimate fall from grace.

It was an excellent - and perhaps prudent -moment to announce his retirement. Except that Armstrong discovered that he couldn't bear retiring. Less than four years later he was back, declaring his determination to enter the 2009 Tour de France and recover the yellow jersey. By this stage, however, he was about to turn 38. There seemed no way he could win on those punishing mountains without taking performance enhancing drugs. There was also no way he would not be found out.

No fewer than three feature films about Lance Armstrong's classical fall from grace are now in the works. Ben Foster is slated to play Armstrong for director Stephen Frears, with Bradley Cooper the most likely casting for Jay Roache's version and, as yet, no more than a script in the works for director J.J. Abrams. Brilliance, power and shame: Armstrong's story is full of compelling narrative ingredients. In the meantime, however, there is The Armstrong Lie, a long and meticulous meditation on Lance Armstrong and his doomed career by prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney.

Lance Armstrong during his heyday winning the 17th stage of the Tour de France in July 2004. Photo: Reuters

Gibney started making his film in 2008, at the point where Armstrong had just announced his veteran's return to combat. Of course he was intrigued by Armstrong, with his will to win and need to be celebrated for winning, as a great documentary subject. At the same time, as he admits in the course of his film, he was as much caught up in the romance of this comeback as anyone. He wanted Lance Armstrong to win that Tour. He had become a fan. He wanted what Armstrong tells the camera to be the film's happy ending. Except it was Armstrong, who had turned his life into a motivational story, who needed that ending; documentaries don't have to be happy.

Gibney did not make the film he expected to make and, given he was able to interview Armstrong only once and briefly after he eventually admitted doping, the new version isn't half as tough as one might expect of a director renowned for warts-and-all exposes. Even so, it is a fine portrait of delusion and disgrace. "Smart and enthralling," says one critic. "Gibney gives the truth as full an airing as seems humanly possible," says another, "given that the subject is a world-class liar."

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The Armstrong Lie was a phrase first coined in French by the sports newspaper L'Equipe which, as one might imagine, covers cycling in forensic detail. A little over a month after the 2005 Tour de France finished, it published a story saying that frozen samples of Armstrong's urine taken during six different stages of the 1999 Tour had been recently tested and found to contain the banned substance EPO. The suggestion was that all Armstrong's Tour de France victories were achieved on drugs.

As with so much else in his life, Armstrong rode the accusations out. ''Unfortunately, the witch-hunt continues,'' he wrote on his web page. ''I will simply restate what I have said many times: I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs.'' At that stage, his life seemed charmed. In a bizarre reversal, the Union Cycliste Internationale decided it was the laboratory itself that required investigation and successfully demanded that Armstrong's accusers apologise to him. Nevertheless, he chose that moment to announce he was retiring from competition.

Armstrong during the making of the film with director Alex Gibney and director of photography Maryse Alberti. Photo: Sony Pictures Releasing Internat

His comeback was difficult; apart from anything else, he claimed - and, indeed, still claims - to be doing it clean. Throughout 2008 he competed in races that constituted practice runs for the Tour de France; his performances were disappointing. Then it was 2009 and the Tour, with Gibney and his crew in tow. For the first few days he was showing signs of intense strain, as if he were struggling to keep up with the peloton. Yet somehow, on the hardest day of all, Armstrong had a burst of his old strength, stayed at the front of the pack and even ended the day looking bright. Unusually, a blood test was taken as he got off his bike. The results proved his undoing.

Armstrong came under a US federal investigation for doping. As always, he denied all allegations and continued to compete, but bowed to the inevitable by retiring in 2011. In August 2012, the United States Anti-Doping Agency declared that he had been banned for life from competing not just in cycling, but any sport. His titles were stripped from him.

Armstrong being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey last year. Photo: Reuters

The one concession to his honour came from the Union Cycliste International, which decided not to award the voided titles to the runners-up in the usual way. Doping was so common during Armstrong's dream run of wins that it was unlikely anyone could be guaranteed to have won clean.

As his subject entered a snarl of legal hearings, Gibney set aside his documentary and its heroic narrative. He took it up again once the judgment had been delivered, but the film he would now make would inevitably be very different. For one thing, Lance Armstrong had decided to come clean. In January 2013, he entered that great modern confessional: The Oprah Winfrey Show. As Gibney says, the first few minutes of the interview are electrifying. With her unique combination of the masterly and the maternal, Oprah demands Armstrong answer ''yes'' or ''no'' to a series of bald questions. Did he take illegal substances? Did he lie? Yes, yes. There, he's said it. Armstrong's direct gaze at his famous inquisitor doesn't waver - but then, it never did.

''Here's the thing,'' says Gibney, who has the bluff, bar-room manner of an old-school journo. ''Even when I started the project, I knew the stories and suspicions about Armstrong doping; I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. What struck me, though, only when all the detail started to come out, was that maybe I was part of a PR job. That I was part of the lie. And that pissed me off, that I'd been used.''

But that was the thing about Lance Armstrong: an unshakeable conviction in himself that he could persuade others to share. He didn't just claim to test clean; he stared into one camera after another and protested his innocence. It is that powerful gaze, along with the perception that he had willed himself back from the brink of death, that has made people want to believe him.

Up close, of course, he is rather different. During his racing career, Armstrong was a road bully who made a lot of enemies, some of whom would turn on him later. A brief clip in The Armstrong Lie that shows him sharing a podium with Bill Clinton is worthy of a moment's reflection, says Gibney. ''There they are, two big liars, but Clinton is loved. Armstrong was never loved. Armstrong was feared. What made him great on the bike was his cruelty, his ability not to care about other people, in fact viciously to go after them.''

In another clip, he shows an interview with a 16-year-old Lance Armstrong, then an up-and-coming day racer. ''He doesn't say 'I like to win'. He says 'I like to beat people'. That's quite telling, I think. So I think when he does come back, there are all these people waiting to take him down.''

At the same time, Armstrong understood how to manipulate a broader public. In 1997, when he was first declared cancer free, he become the frontman for his own foundation, which raised millions for cancer sufferers and their families. Every time he was dragged through the mire of accusation and multiple tests, he had a sensational comeback: his persecutors were not just attacking him but all the little children with cancer he was helping and would be able to help as long as he was on top.

Gibney's previous documentary subjects include the torturers at Abu Ghraib, the people who made money out of nothing at Enron, and Wikileaks' Julian Assange. He frequently draws parallels between them, disparate as they are. Armstrong was like Assange, he says, in that they were both ''afflicted with 'noble cause corruption'. They believe that if they are doing something for good, they are entitled to be a little bit nasty. So I think Armstrong came to have a pleasure in lying. It was almost a skill he developed.'' But he was also like the smart people at Enron, in that he was an obvious winner. That, in itself, was a kind of cover. ''Because I think there is an acceptance in modern culture of a kind of win-at-all-costs mentality,'' says Gibney. ''The idea is that if you get ahead and break some bones along the way, that's OK because, at the end of the day, it will inspire everybody.''

There is no question that Armstrong considers himself a scapegoat.

''And I think he is right to some extent,'' says Gibney. ''And wrong to some extent. I think he's right in this sense: all the top riders were clearly doping so, in that context, he was the best athlete in a dirty era. What he doesn't get is that it's not fair to say it was a level playing field. Because he had such a powerful story and because he meant so much financially to cycling, maybe the officials looked the other way when there were likely suspicions of doping. Maybe because he has so many resources, he can hire the best doctor. So then it's not a level playing field. It's not even so much about doping. It's about power.''

Gibney had begun five years before by marvelling at Armstrong's determination to return. Road cycling is the hardest of all the sports; the toll it takes even on a healthy person is huge. Why would anyone want to put himself through so much pain? That question didn't change after Armstrong was discovered to have given himself blood boosters and was subsequently shamed and stripped of his titles; on the contrary, it became all the more pertinent.

If he had just left well alone, as Gibney muses aloud in voice-over, he would still have all his trophies on the shelf and still be the champion who came back from cancer to do good in the world. Clearly, that wasn't enough. Nothing was ever enough.

As to the why of it, Gibney never answers his own question. ''It's still a mystery,'' he says. ''But you see his answer. I ask him, 'Why did you come back? Didn't you have a sense that people might be waiting for you?' and he says, 'Yes, of course,' and then he smiles. He knew the danger of coming back, but he did it anyway. I think that testifies to his arrogance. Like 'oh f--- it, I did it once, so I can do it again'.''

Like the scorpion in Aesop's fable, Lance Armstrong could not go against his nature. If he wasn't in it and winning it, he might as well be dead.

The Armstrong Lie opens on Thursday at Cinema Nova and Brighton Dendy.